How do I prevent Portfolio from splitting stories across sprints?

Portfolio is splitting stories across sprints in a live plan. It only does this when I have actual team members identified, not when the team is empty. When the team has members, it seems like the scheduling algorithm is using the number of people on a team instead of just using the story-point velocity.

How do I prevent this from happening, @Martin Suntinger? Let me know if I need to log an issue on jira.atlassian.com.

2 answers

Hi @Peter Callies, this definitely sounds like something the team should have a closer look at. There are a few things that can behave differently when having team members defined:

1) The "maximum resources" constraint is being respected. This is under the plan configuration > Scheduling, a setting for up to how many people will be assigned to a single user story. you could easily test if this is impacting the situation by increasing that value to the number of people on your team, essentially saying if possible, the whole team could work on the same story at a given time.

2) The velocity is being adjusted in case of absences - if a person on the team is on vacation for a given sprint or parts of a sprint, the velocity will be adjusted proportionally to the regular weekly hours of that person. For example, if there are 5 full-time people on the team, and 1 is on leave for a sprint, the forecasted velocity will be 4/5th of the normal velocity.

If none of these factors explain the behaviour and adjusting the settings doesn't result in the expected outcome still, please raise a support case for us to have a closer look, ideally with some screenshots of the input and resulting schedule via support.atlassian.com. Thanks!

I played with the maximum resources constraint. Here were the results:

No people defined on the team: completion date of 8/29 with no story splitting.

Seven people on the team, default "maximum resources" (3?): completion date of 9/21 and stories split across sprints.

Seven people on the team, "maximum resources" set to 7: Completion date of 8/29 with no story splitting.

Regardless of the outcome of my experiments, I don't think the number of resources should have any factor on the schedule-planning for a Scrum team – at least from a portfolio management perspective. The team's velocity is the team's velocity. How they achieve that velocity is irrelevant.

(I had no absences defined for any of the team members so that was not a factor.)

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